Temptation
by Pitry
Summary: The Doctor makes Jack an offer he can't refuse. Jack accidentally turns him down. Post Waters of Mars.


**N/A - **Written for the 2010 Summer Holidays Winter Companion challenge, to the prompt "prologue-truth-sting-rewind". Many thanks for Wojelah for beta'ing!

Pubs are a society of their own. Their own crowd, their own codes, their own language. It's in the way you sit, the way you look around, the way you drink. Throughout history there are different planets, different species, different eras, but that language is understood by all. And out of his time, away from his home, the man sitting in that particular pub was giving off a very strong message.

He was one of those people who drank to forget. One of those people who tried to get so drunk that they wouldn't be able to look at themselves in the mirror. He was drinking as if waiting for the end of the world.

For him, it already had.

The barman called him Jack when he brought him his drink - his favourite whiskey. He shrugged it off - the name, not the drink. Jack was as good a name as any, and he didn't care one way or the other, as long as the drinks kept coming. As long as he could try to drown himself in the alcohol.

As long as the man in front of him just went away, too. Pubs had languages of their own, and this guy didn't speak it. Before, Jack would have looked at him, checked him over - he was definitely worth checking out. He wasn't handsome in the regular meaning of the word - he was certainly not as attractive as Jack, or so Jack would have thought. Once. But there was something to him. Something infectious. The kind of charisma that could drown people better than whiskey. Jack would have recognised it had he been less drunk, less sunk in his own misery.

But with drink after drink and a burning desire to forget, he was only aware that the man was sitting there, staring at him. "Not interested," he muttered. "Go away."

"You're drunk," said the man.

"None of your business."

Before he realised it, the man's fingers were touching his temples. "What the - " he struggled for a moment, and then froze. He was a Time Agent, he'd had training - mental training, psychic training - but nothing he was ever trained in could bring a drunken man to sobriety this fast. This was something different, this was something new, and this was something the man who was known here as "Jack" had to deal with, right now.

"What are you?" he whispered at the man - if he was a man. And now that Jack was sober, he could notice more. The coldness of his gaze, matching the cold of his fingertips, and the feeling of cold arrogance all around him. And there was something dangerous about him, too. This was someone to be wary of, someone who would destroy him without batting an eye-lid. Someone to run away from, and keep on running. And then the memory of the past two years rushed by, his own actions, the people _he_ destroyed - and Jack remained seated.

If he were to be destroyed, it might as well be by the hands of a stranger. It was nothing more than he deserved.

"That's the wrong question," said the stranger.

"What's the right question, then?"

Once again he felt the cold fingertips at his temples, and even though this time he was ready, the rush of memories was still unbearable. "The right question," whispered the voice in his ear, "is do you want to forget?"

In a different corner of the pub, a much older, much wiser Captain Jack Harkness caught sight of a familiar man in a long, brown coat, and the even more familiar man with him. He stared in confusion as the Doctor got up, winked at him, and led the young Time Agent out of the pub.

X

Three hours later, tired of waiting for the Time Lord and his younger self to return, Jack gave up and left the pub in favour of the dark, empty Hub. He should have expected the darkness, of course - he was the one who told Ianto to go home early today. And while it made perfect sense at the time, right now the darkness felt more unfriendly than usual.

Preoccupied with the questions in his mind, he didn't realise he wasn't quite alone until he passed the parked Tardis. Even then he stared at it for a long time before walking towards the wooden door and knocking hesitantly. "Doctor?" he called, but there was no reply.

Trying the blue door didn't do any good - of course it wouldn't. He didn't have a key anymore, lost it in that year that never happened. He should ask the Doctor for a new key. The answer, of course, would be "no", but he should ask anyway. "Doctor?" he called again, knocking on the door. Nothing. "Are you in there?"

Silence.

The Doctor probably wasn't even there. Why he would choose to park his ship inside the Torchwood Hub rather than in the streets of Cardiff was beyond Jack, but then, the Doctor's behaviour never made sense. It would be just as unreasonable to find him - sitting on Jack's bed, leaning against the wall, looking at Jack with cold, brown eyes.

It wasn't until Jack got a good look at the Doctor's eyes that things started making sense. He remembered the last time he saw the Doctor - tweed and bow tie. Uncomfortable, needing him to help save the world again, and for some reason refusing to look at Jack. But just as he was about to leave, he'd seemed to consider for a moment, and simply said, "I'm sorry."

Jack asked why, but the Doctor was just his regular cryptic self - the one trait that was constant across all regenerations. "The last time we met for me," the Doctor said then, "the next time we meet for you. I was upset, and afraid. I was afraid. I knew I was about to die - regenerate, about to regenerate. I was doing things I should never have done. I'm sorry."

Jack knew all about timelines, of course. Never cross your own timeline, never get even close to your own timeline, never change that which has to happen. But he couldn't help but wish the Doctor would have broken these rules every once in a while, or at least bend them a little bit. Then he wouldn't have evaded his questions, and Jack would have been prepared for this surprise visit from this Doctor, brown suit and long, brown coat, tie, and hair that never sat still - much like himself. It was the Doctor Jack had thought he'd never see again. On his bed. Sitting perfectly still, not moving a muscle. Just looking at Jack, cold and calculating and so, so alien.

"Doctor," he said at last.

"Jack," came the immediate response, in a voice Jack had almost forgotten.

"So, you show up after all this time and all you can think of is going straight to bed?" he asked, joking, smiling, flirting. The Doctor didn't respond. Okay. Jack's smile subsided. "Why are you here?" he asked, more serious.

"I'm here to make you an offer," the Time Lord answered.

"Oh?" asked Jack, wearing his most suggestive smile. "What kind of an offer?"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "What kind of offer would you like?" he asked, and Jack managed to turn the involuntary sound into a cough in the last minute. The Doctor finally smiled at his display of shock, but it wasn't an inviting smile. He was amused, not friendly.

And yet - this was not something that Captain Jack Harkness could let slide without making sure he'd misunderstood. "You know what kind of an offer I'd like," he said. The Doctor said nothing.

It took Jack just a moment to think about it, and then he was sitting on the bed, next to the alien, and pulling him closer by his tie. "Why are you really here?" he asked quietly, no longer joking.

The brown eyes fixed on him for a moment. "You know about time," the Doctor said softly. Jack just nodded, waiting for the Time Lord to continue. "The Laws of Time."

"I know enough to know we don't mess with them," Jack said, looking straight at the Doctor's face, but his hands were undoing the Doctor's tie. Never once did he look at them, afraid to draw unwanted attention and break the spell, afraid the Doctor's hand would stop him. But it didn't.

Instead, the Doctor just kept on talking. "You can mess with them. If you know how to. The right word, the right action, in the right moment, in the right place... "

"That was the Time Lords. That's what your people were in charge of." The tie was now completely loose. He pulled away the cloth from the Doctor's collar, still with no sign of protest, and put it down next to them.

The Doctor pulled away from Jack, leaning back on the wall. "And now they're gone. And all those things I know. All those things - I can change."

Ah, this was what it was about. That was what the Doctor - the newer Doctor, the older one - told him. The Doctor was afraid to die. "You can't change death," Jack said softly, and, hesitating, reached for the alien's cheek. With his other hand, he was undoing the Doctor's shoelaces - still, to no protest.

"You don't even know which deaths can be changed," said the Doctor coldly.

"Death is a part of life. You know that. Without it, life is meaningless."

"Like yours?" came the question. For a moment, Jack was taken aback, removing his hand from the Doctor's face. That was a low blow, and the Doctor knew it. And like always, he didn't seem to regret it. He probably did, Jack knew deep inside. He saw that, in that year that never happened. Saw just how sorry the Doctor was for everything, even when he was pretending he wasn't. And with that memory, any anger he had felt with the alien dissipated.

"I live... thanks to the people around me," he said, and his hand was now taking off one shoe, then a sock, and another.

"But they die."

And Jack was thinking of Owen and Tosh as he pulled the Doctor towards him once again, this time undoing the buttons of his jacket. "Yes," he said. "They die. And it still hurts, Doctor. Every time. But I do - what I can. To help them. To save them. To show them the universe," he smiled again in nostalgia - "like you showed me."

The brown jacket was thrown unceremoniously on the floor, and Jack proceeded to pull up the shirt underneath.

"But when you're a time traveller, you can save them. You show up before they die, and take them away, and save the day."

"It doesn't work that way," he broke eye contact just for a moment as the shirt went over the Doctor's head, and then went back and held the Doctor's face with both hands, looking straight into his eyes. He could see it now, he imagined. That uncertainty, that fear the other Doctor had mentioned. Right there in the brown eyes.

"But it could," said the Doctor. "I could do it. If you wanted me to. All you have to do is ask, and I could - "

"No," Jack replied. "You couldn't."

He left the bed and stood up, pulling the unresisting Doctor with him, pulling him up, pulling him closer, all the time holding him, not letting him get away.

"What were you doing there today? In the pub?" he asked again.

"Talking to you," the Doctor answered simply.

"What was I doing there?"

There was no response. Jack took a step closer, was now as close as he's ever been to the Time Lord, could feel his breath - surprisingly warm - on his face. Still holding him in one hand, he used the other in one quick, sure movement to undo the button and zipper of the brown suit's trousers, and pull them down together with the pants underneath. "I don't remember ever being here. Not before I met you."

The Doctor didn't answer, so Jack moved his mouth closer to the Doctor's, and whispered, "What have you done?" but he knew he would get no response, so he just kissed him instead and was surprised to feel the Doctor kissing him back, a passionate, desperate kiss, full of need and loneliness and fear.

It was less than a week later that Jack had led his lover into a trap, that he murdered his own grandson, trying to block out the screams of his mother as she watched. She looked at him for only a few seconds before she turned her back on him and left, and he could only think of the Doctor, the time traveller who had shown up before they died and nearly offered to take him away.

X

Pubs are a society of their own, with a language of their own. Out of his time, away from his home, the man who was sitting in that particular pub was giving off a very strong message. He was one of those people who drank to forget. One of those people who tried to get so drunk that they wouldn't be able to look at themselves in the mirror. He was drinking as if waiting for the end of the world.

For him, it already had.

He did not act surprised when a tall man in a brown suit, a brown coat and brown hair that refused to sit still sat down on the stool beside him. Captain Jack Harkness finished his drink before he turned to face the Doctor.

"There's just one thing I don't yet understand," he said bitterly. "That day, in the pub..." that same day you could have warned me, suggested to warn me, but didn't, that day you could have stopped everything -

"You don't remember what you were doing there, all those years ago."

Jack remained silent. And then the Doctor looked at him, for a moment, not in pity or sorrow but just - curiosity. And cold calculation. And then his fingers lightly brushed the tip of Jack's temple, and his mind lightly touched Jack's own, and two years of memories came rushing back into his head, more betrayal, more guilt, more deaths. Two years that were not taken from him by the Time Agency but by himself, because he couldn't live with them anymore.

_My bad bad angel_, sang a voice in the background but he couldn't quite hear anymore, because the world crashed all around him. All he registered was that sweet voice of temptation, whispering in his ear. "Question is, do you want to forget?" And the song went on: _You put the devil in me_.


End file.
